This is the first of a four post series on The Storytelling Enterprise. This series outlines the power and promise of capturing the organizations’ relevant selling stories for your sales team and – in a timely way – delivering them so they can be easily practiced and mastered.

‘Selling’ Stories Are Key to Good Selling

Companies hire salespeople to have influential conversations that compel prospects to consider — and ultimately buy – their offering.

When a good salesperson is having a conversation with a prospect, they are usually asking thoughtful questions, listening actively, and telling relevant stories. These “selling” stories are typically short (no longer than three minutes—think four to six bullet points) and are usually about the salesperson’s industry, company, customers, competitors, or offering. They are often told in response to a prospect’s question or objection (stated or implied).

Relevant Selling Stories Are Hard to Get

Typically, a rep’s stories come from their own experience or the experience of colleagues or other people in the industry. Unfortunately, it can take years for a salesperson to build a repertoire of stories that add any significant perspective to an executive-level prospect conversation.Read More

This is the second of a four part series on The Storytelling Enterprise. This series outlines the power and promise of capturing the organizations’ relevant selling stories for your sales team and – in a timely way – delivering them so they can be easily practiced and mastered.

This is the third of a four part series on The Storytelling Enterprise. This series outlines the power and promise of capturing the organizations’ relevant selling stories for your sales team and – in a timely way – delivering them so they can be easily practiced and mastered.

This is the final and fourth post of ‘The Storytelling Enterprise’ series. This series outlines the power and promise of capturing the organizations’ relevant selling stories for your sales team and – in a timely way – delivering them so they can be easily practiced, coached and mastered.

There are many parallels between the state of enterprise selling today and the state of civil aviation in the 1930s. Edwin Link invented the first flight simulator in 1934 and helped pull aviation out of its dark ages, when pilots were “winging it” and crashing and burning at an alarming rate. Understanding how he did it helps us see how we can pull ourselves out of our current selling dark age.

They may not often get the spotlight, but salespeople are some of the most powerful people in the world. They listen, inform, influence, and lead important people to action. Those are astonishing skills — and they’re always on display in selling conversations.

The writer E.M. Forster defined memorable stories as “a fact plus an emotion.” His famous example: The king died, and then the queen died are two facts. However, The king died, and then the queen died of grief is a story.

Front-line salespeople are desperate for new and varied stories. For them, compelling stories are ammunition, used to address prospects’ ever-shifting priorities and objections. Unfortunately, most sales teams don’t have a story library; they rarely collect and document stories for reps to use.

Collecting great stories and saving them in accessible formats are critical first steps in empowering your reps. But how can your team use engaging stories in relevant ways to fuel compelling sales conversations?

When salespeople watch selling-story videos, they immediately learn ways to improve interactions with prospects. But owning those stories — knowing them authoritatively, and confidently weaving them into selling conversations — requires more effort.

You’ve heard the story of the blind men who touched different parts of an elephant, and how they argued about what they’d discovered. (It’s a spear! No, a snake! A tree trunk! A wall!)Many sales teams have similarly incomplete views of their markets.

The product is launched – the press release is out, the website updated, the fact sheets distributed, the presentation deck is polished. “My work is done here,” says the product marketing manager. “Now, it’s up to sales.”

Great customer insights are born out by watching customers use your offerings and during the product development and delivery process. Both give managers a solid, in-depth understanding of real-world user stories. Once product marketing gets involved, they collect those experiences and transform them into case studies – a time-tested classic output of B2B marketers. Even in a world of social media and brand publishing, the case study lives on, produced now in more formats (video, animation, paper and digital form) and across many more channels (twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube).